Identifying Host Galaxies of Supermassive Black Hole Binaries Found by PTAs
arxiv(2024)
摘要
Supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs) present us with exciting
opportunities for multi-messenger science. These systems are thought to form
naturally in galaxy mergers and therefore have the potential to produce
electromagnetic (EM) radiation as well as gravitational waves (GWs) detectable
with pulsar timing arrays (PTAs). Once GWs from individually resolved SMBHBs
are detected, the identification of the host galaxy will be a major challenge
due to the ambiguity in possible EM signatures and the poor localization
capability of PTAs. In order to aid EM observations in choosing which sources
to follow up, we attempt to quantify the number of plausible hosts in both
realistic and idealistic scenarios. We outline a host galaxy identification
pipeline that injects a single-source GW signal into a simulated PTA dataset,
uses production-level techniques to recover the signal, quantifies the
localization region and number of galaxies contained therein, and finally
imposes cuts on the galaxies using the binary parameters estimated from the GW
search. In an ideal case, we find that the 90
241 deg^2, containing about 14 to 341 galaxies. After cuts, the number of
galaxies remaining ranges from 22 at worst to 1 (the true host) at best. In a
more realistic case, if the signal is sufficiently localized, the sky areas
range from 287 deg^2 to 530 deg^2 and enclose about 285 to 1238 galaxies. After
cuts, the number of galaxies is 397 at worst and 27 at best. While the
signal-to-noise ratio is the primary determinant of the localization area of a
given source, we find that the size of the area is also influenced by the
proximity of nearby pulsars on the sky and the chirp mass of the source.
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